another toe punt for the cloud

I got a linked in notification that one of my contacts had an updated profile, as the train left Genève. I clicked the link, it still hadn’t loaded by Nyon. Thats 30 km or about 10 mins, to load 1 (small text) page, well not load, in fact.

Of course at Nyon a telecoms provider from a neighbouring country reaches in to try and screw some roaming charges out of us.

As this particular contact lives between Genève and Nyon, it would have been quicker to take a horse and cart and call at his house and get the update face à face like in the olden days when everything was black and white.

I don’t know what coverage is like by you, but I seem to spend significant time at places with slow or no mobile network coverage. so either I am just a very unlucky cloud client or the infrastructure is not yet quite where it needs to be to fuel the web 2.0 fantasy. Which is it?

cheers

simon

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This entry was posted on Sunday, 15th May, 2011 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Spreadsheet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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6 Responses to “another toe punt for the cloud”

If this makes you feel any better, your cloudy mishaps stories have helped me see both sides of the Atlantic in a more balanced light. I keep complaining about the dismal quality of cell phone coverage in California (right in the heart of San Francisco, in my apartment, about 2/3 of my cell conversations get dropped) and more generally, about the sad infrastructure compared to Europe. It seems that the picture isn’t quite that simple after all. I have a hard time believing that coverage could be worse anywhere in Europe than in the US (OK maybe in some parts of Transylvania) – but at least I never got hit with sneaky roaming charges…

Mathias
I have spotted another bizzaro thing. My droid battery lasts max 18hrs in a normal day in Switzerland or the UK. In a normal day in the Netherlands it lasts at least 48 hrs!
I’m pretty sure thats due to the different signal quality, as from what I have seen that makes a huge difference to battery life, and phone temperature.
in the UK I can’t make or receive calls at home, in ch if I go in some rooms I get hit with roaming, in others I get a usable signal from my actual provider. In nl I just have a clean 4 or 5 bars everywhere.

Yeh… I live in a rural area in Ireland and there is no broadband mobile signal there. I work at the moment in Geneva and didn’t sign up for a mobile plan here thinking I would only use the mobile occasionally. In fact because the apartment is in France I’m actually making a roaming call at over 2euro/min every time I call over 2 km. So in retrospect should I have bought one of those Androphones and called over Skype? Or does Skype do roaming charges too?

About the bandwidth piracy .. can you block certain networks in your phone? Or set it to ask you if you want to switch provider? Although I can’t see the latter being more than an annoyance to a frontalier.
There are probably some answers on glocals.com or englishforum.ch

My experience of phone coverage in northern California seems to be less disappointing than Mathias’s, but it’s terrible up in the Sierras. I figure the mountains are in large part to blame, which could explain poor coverage in Switzerland.

So now way to program ‘smart’ phones never to roam? That is, none support whitelists of approved carriers to which it’d be OK to connect? Then again, there’s no carrier in the EU region which provides coverage across all of the EU territory? If so, what exactly is the benefit of the common market? [Cynical: to allow all these small carriers to collect their roaming fees from you no matter where you live?]